SEO Best Practices

In my previous post on How to do SEO, I talked about the basic stuff that you need to work on in order to kick start SEO for your website.

Let’s assume you have started or have completed almost all the basic stuff that I mentioned in my previous report. Some of the SEO work is ongoing in nature, such as getting links, adding content etc. SEO is a continuous process; you will need to consistently work on getting links, adding relevant content, and optimizing the content for SEO.

In today’s post of “How to do SEO part II”, I will take up Google Webmaster tools in detail. If you have a Google account, you can register for Google webmaster account using that account itself.

There are two things you will need to do:

A) Add your site.
This is fairly simple. Just click on the “Add a site” button and type in your site’s url.

B. Verify your site
Unless you verify your site, you won’t be able to access reports that Google webmaster tools provides you regarding crawl errors, search queries, links to your site, sitemaps etc.

Here is the step by step instruction from Google regarding site verification -

1. Download this HTML verification file. [googlverificationfile.html]
2. Upload the file to http://www.yoursite.com/
3. Confirm successful upload by visiting
http://www.yoursite.com/googlverificationfile.html in your browser.
4. Click Verify below -  To stay verified, don’t remove the HTML file, even after verification succeeds.

You will also need to upload the XML sitemap for your site. Here is a link where Google explains in detail about the benefits of an Xml sitemap-
https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156184&hl=en
To generate your XML sitemap, go to -www.xml-sitemaps.com
Once you have the sitemap, log in to webmaster tools account and submit the XML sitemap. You will find the link under the site configuration section shown below: -

Try out the Google webmaster tool. You will benefit from the information you receive on crawl errors, links from other site, website ranking status for keywords that are relevant for your site, and much more.

How to do SEO?

I have had this question put to me in many different ways, mostly:-

How do I improve my website’s visibility online?
How do I improve search engine rankings for my website?
What do you do and how do you do it?
Can I do SEO myself?
Interesting, Can you teach me SEO?
Wow! I want my website to rank in search engines too. Can you show me how to do it?

I tell everyone that SEO is not rocket science, with knowledge and loads of patience you can do SEO yourself. Nevertheless, there are two ways of going about it:-

1. The first is to hire SEO consultants to do the SEO work for you. There are various websites that will provide you with a list of SEO consultants. SEO consultants charge depending upon the kind of SEO service you want them to provide. Beware of SEO services that guarantee ranking in the top ten results of the search engine ranking pages. It is essential that you follow white hat seo or ethical seo always.

2. The second way is to do it yourself. This blog, SEO best practices, was started with the goal of helping out webmasters with SEO. Although, not the easiest of things to do, SEO is a mix of art and science and requires a ton of patience.

To begin with, you can start with the below-mentioned SEO basics, I have covered almost all the basic stuff that you will need in order to do SEO yourself. 

1. Define your website goal or objective. What is the purpose of your website? What do you plan to achieve from having a website  or blog?

2. Who is your target audience?

2. Write effective Title tags  and Description Meta tags for each of your web pages.

3. Optimize the content of each of your web page. Your page title and description should be in synchrony with what your page is all about. Optimize the content   in each of your web page with relevant keywords/ key phrases.

4. Submit to Search directories

5. Get relevant links

6. Get a Google Webmaster Account

7. Get Google WebAnalytics installed

To be continued…